Chapter 8: Closed Doors

Edda was the one who said it first, on the walk back down from the round hall.

"The seven had families."

I stopped in the road.

"Greyhollow families," she said. "Mothers. Brothers. Somebody packed them a lunch the morning they got on that truck."

I opened the ledger to the back page.

Seven names, in my handwriting, copied from what Edda and the tracker and the cook remembered.

The tracker had known three of them.

Edda had known one better than anyone.

"They weren't there," I said. "They didn't see anything."

"They saw who sent their kids," Edda said. "And they got letters home. Everyone writes home the first month, before they learn better."

So we went knocking.

The first house was a lumber family on the north road.

Their son had gone south at nineteen for stealing a truck.

He'd come back in a box four months later, and the box had stayed closed.

The father answered the door.

He was a big man with sawdust in his beard.

He looked at my garrison coat and then at my face.

"I know what you're here about," he said.

"Then you know he didn't die of rogues."

"I know he's dead." He started to close the door. "I've got three more at home. I'm not burying another."

The second house didn't open at all.

A curtain moved, and then a lamp went out.

At the third, a woman with flour on her arms let us as far as the porch.

She cried, and gave me a cup of tea, and said, "Please don't put my name on anything."

By noon we'd been to five.

By noon, I'd been called a liar twice and a hearth-shamed little rogue once.

The man who said it had a daughter buried on the Line under a stake with no name on it.

"He's right to be scared," Edda said when the door shut. "Don't hate him for it."

"I don't hate him."

"Yes, you do. Hate him for an hour. Then stop."

We went into the market square to buy bread, because the cook had threatened to quit if we came home without it.

The square was busy.

It always was on the day after a rite.

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